Chris Ngige, Minister of Labour and Employment, says President
Muhammadu Buhari’s economic agenda is tailored towards aggressive
economic recovery of the Nigerian economy.
The minister was quoted as saying this in a statement signed by Mrs
Rhoda iliya, an Assistant Director, on Monday in Abuja, NAN reports.
Ngige said this while addressing the 3rd Session of the Specialised
Technical Committee on Social Development, Labour and Employment of the
Africa Union, which took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The theme of the conference: “Poverty Eradication Through Strategic
Investments at National and Regional Levels Towards Social Development,
Labour and Employment in Africa”, aligned to the “Africa Agenda 2063 for
Prosperity.”
Ngige was a lead discussant in a paper entitled: “The Efforts of the Nigerian Government Towards the Eradication of Poverty.’’
He said that the economic development agenda of the President
Buhari’s administration was tailored towards a concurrent growth of the
three-tier federal structures of national, states and local governments
in line with the diversity of the nation’s economy.
“The present administration met a battered economy in 2015, which
slipped into recession in the first and second quarters of 2016,
prompting an aggressive economic recovery plan with big emphasis on
agriculture and food security.
“The effects were dramatic. We boosted agriculture and raised the
capacity of the nation to feed her-self, to the extent that importation
of rice for example, dropped by 95 per cent.
“The same goes for sorghum. This decisive inward look was pivoted on
the elastic efforts of government, which the Central Bank of Nigeria
piloted through the Anchor Borrowers Programme in agriculture, ‘’ he
said.
Ngige said on the issue of social investments, that there were the
Home Grown School Feeding Programme, which had been complementing the
free education policy at the primary and junior secondary school levels;
He added that this had stemmed the incidence of school dropouts, which he identified as precursor to child labour.
The minister said that the programme had captured about N10 million school children in 25 states of the federation.
He also explained that the present administration had other social
investment programmes, such as the N-Power under which the Federal
Government had employed 500,000 graduates, the N-Build where 50,000 were
engaged.
He listed other programmes to include the N-Agro, N-Knowledge,
N-Health, and N-Build where hundreds of thousands were also employed.
Ngige added that government Enterprises and Empowerment Programmes
also made interest-free loans available to small businesses as well as
the National Cash Transfer programme (Conditional and Unconditional) to
over 1million vulnerable and poor Nigerians.
The minister noted that this was besides the thousands already
benefitting from similar programmes by the National Directorate of
Employment(NDE).
Ngige, therefore, said that the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan
would not have been impossible without the anti-corruption measures such
as the Treasury Single Account(TSA) and the whistle blowing policy
which government put in place.
According to him, this programme has shut down leakages and ease the
recovery of stolen funds as well as the efforts of the anti-corruption
agencies primed for zero-corruption agenda of the government.
Ngige further said that government’s efforts in the last four years
had charted a new course for Nigeria with the results of the giant
strides made manifest in core sectors of agriculture, anti-corruption ,
employment generation, infrastructural development and war on
insurgency.
He added that Africa would remain the hewers of wood and fetchers of
water, (quoting late Emperor Hallie Selassie of Ethiopia) if drastic
measures were not taken by the leaders to fiercely tackle myriads of
teething underdevelopment scourge assailing the continent.
